It All Starts With One Simple Question

by Michael on July 1, 2011

“Why are you doing it?”

There are a lot of noise in my industry right now as CPAs flock (okay, maybe not all at once, but there certainly are noticeable movements) to the attempted practice of “client accounting services” while utilizing the latest “cloud technology” and adopting a “monthly fixed fee” approach – information they’ve gathered from their latest conference. Hundreds of pages of “best practice white papers” are being written to teach firms how to differentiate themselves from, well, everyone else that’s reading the same white paper. Interesting.

And I’ve come across many prospective customers who ask me an important question. And they very well should know the answer to. “How is DeepSky different?”

And I tell them this. It starts with one simple question I ask all potential customers, “Why are you doing accounting?”

You see. I founded DeepSky to do one thing – to help entrepreneurs be great. And I need that same buy-in from all of our customers. I need alignment. I need to know that you are doing accounting because you believe that it can help you (your business) be great (however “great” is defined by you – to have a peace of mind, to make more profits, to buy that new office, to build a happy workplace, to change the world. Your choice.)

Sure. We live and breathe technology. We love the cloud too. We price on value (not cost plus). We don’t have time sheets. We love creative entrepreneurs. We have a ton of fun at work. We work in a loft above a warehouse. We have talented accounting ninjas. We’ve got the best corporate t-shirts the accounting industry has ever seen.

But these are just “how” we do things differently. Some are easier to copy than others. They are not “why” we are different. And I think our “why” is truly remarkable. And guess what? It’s pretty darn hard for other people to copy that.

We’ve built a company to help entrepreneurs be great. It’s our “why.” We want to be on the same side of the table as our customers. That’s why this is all we are – a radical outsourced accounting department with a tech savvy spin – no compliance work, no attestation work, no noise. And we demonstrate  our why at the beginning of each potential relationship with a simple question.

“Why are you doing it?”

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  • http://www.xero.com Richard Phillips

    Love the attitude Michael and also your reasoning behind the business. At Xero we’re passionate about building beautiful accounting software, but the ‘why’ goes much deeper. Making the world a better place by connecting CPA’s to their clients across realtime financial data in the cloud is the real driver. If we can improve GDP by finding productivity improvements of just 5% in every SMB across the board then the numbers start to stack up to look pretty good for the global economy. By putting CPA’s in touch with their clients online across live financial information, we think the improvements would be even bigger than 5%. As compliance work becomes more of a commodity, it’s firms like yours that are driving innovation in the accounting services space to leverage the new visibility you have of client data.

  • http://www.deepsky.co W. Michael Hsu

    Richard. You are absolutely right – the what we do is simple – it is the why (and how) we do it that truly make our companies different and remarkable. We love Xero at DeepSky and are stoked for you guys while we watch your progress from across the pond. Let’s both keep up our work so we can really change the world through what we do. 

    Keep on rocking!

  • Pingback: Why Accounting? | Kevin McCoy, CPA

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